Empirical analysis of video multicast over WiFi

Video multicast service is becoming one of the most important applications over WiFi, due to the increasing popularity of WiFi for multimedia communication. On the one hand, energy efficient operation is required to WiFi technology due to the limited battery power of most WiFi-equipped devices. In this paper, we empirically study the video multicast operation, especially, along with power management operation in two aspects: (1) whether commercial WiFi devices correctly operate as defined in IEEE 802.11 standard and (2) what problem the standard-compliant operation can induce. From our experimental results, we first figure out that some of commercial WiFi devices do not follow the standard with respect to the power saving operation, and this noncompliance worsens interoperability. We also find that the standard-compliant operation may cause significant delay of voice over IP (VoIP) traffic, when video multicast coexists with VoIP. Through this experimental study, we provide the guidelines for energy-efficient video multicast service.